College, university faculty concerned over online plan

Steinberg said he expected the proposal would receive varied reaction, including interest, excitement and “maybe in some instances a lot of fear and trepidation.”

“There is going to be a mix of reactions. That’s OK,” he told reporters. “If it wasn’t a little bit controversial, it wouldn’t be worth doing. What the heck, anybody can introduce the easy bills.“

Jim Miller, a San Diego City College English professor and vice president of American Federation of Teachers, Local 1931, said some educators question the overall premise of the proposal.

“I think the big lie in this legislation is that there is some kind of demand from students for these courses,” he said. “I think what students want are access to quality, smaller face-to-face courses.

“There is a kind of assumption, the basic thing, that everyone wants to get their classes. The difficulty is what kind of classes and whether or not this solution for providing access is going to do what it says it is going to do.”

Along with quality concerns, some chafed at the prospect of handing over the job of educating California’s public college students to for-profit private companies.

“This opens the door to wide-scale privatization of public higher education by turning public institutions into conduits for private profit,” Jim Mahler, president of AFT Local 1931, told local community college instructors in an email.

Mahler said state leaders should be more focused on determining how to fund public higher education with dependable revenue than trying to “legislate curriculum.”

The California Faculty Association released a statement pledging that the organization would work with Steinberg on the issue of online education but expressing concerns about how it might be implemented.